Media theorists have written a great deal about the ways that television has covered catastrophes - extraordinary events, ruptures in our normal everyday experiences - ranging from hurricanes and natural disasters to the LA Riots and the Gulf War. Svetlana Boym, in "Power Shortages: The Soviet Coup and Hurricane Bob" in Media Spectacles, describes the spectacular quality of the disaster - the ways we are drawn towards our television screen, watching with total attention, eager for the most up-to-date information.

Starting with the introduction of CNN in the early 1980s, news has more and more overflowed the boundaries of the traditional network evening newscast, and a growing number of cable channels broadcast around-the-clock news. In the case of the WTC tragedy, all of the networks have either stopped their entertainment broadcasting in order to provide non-stop coverage or, in the case of smaller networks, gone off the air or become secondary transmitters of other network's newscasts. Part of the power of disrupting television's routine programming is the degree to which they disrupt our everyday routines; the shift in the television schedule reminds us of other shifts we are making in our personal lives as we struggle to make decisions in the face of overwhelming tragedy.

Boym worries that in such a context, our ability to question - to separate ourselves from the mass public created through these shared viewing experiences - gets shortcircuited; we become aligned with mass opinions which seem to be taking shape without any individual analysis. She asks, "can a spectator be a dissident?" Or, are we more susceptible to mass shifts in opinion, such as the overwhelming majority support for military action which has surfaced, literally overnight, on public opinion polls. The catastrophe creates a context where ordinary judgement breaks down, when emotions push us forward, and where we arrived at decisions which we might otherwise reject. We hold off panic in such a situation by returning to familiar terms, comfortable values, normal ways of thinking, but this may make it hard to think through the problem from a fresh perspective or arrive at new truths about a changing situation. The routines of news coverage are reassuring in such a context, but they may not what we need to act as citizens in response to debates about public policy.

John Fiske in Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change describes such moments as media events, suggesting that the media event includes not simply the event itself - the horrible loss of life that occurred when the highjacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center - but also all of the meanings that circulate around the event as it is being reported to us via television. Fiske writes, "Media events are sites of maximum visibility and maximum turbulence. They are useful to the cultural analyst because their turbulence bring so much to the surface, even it can be glimpsed only momentarily. The discursive currents and countercurrents swirling around these sites are accessible material for the analyst to work upon."

The media event brings to the surface the values, assumptions, and meanings that are most central to the belief structure of a particular culture, but it may also have the effect of silencing other values, alternative perspectives, competing bids for meaning. What media analysis tries to do is both locate and explain the meanings that seem to dominate our discussions of a particular event - in this case, issues of nationalism, security, morality, mourning, militarism - and at the same time to locate or describe those meanings which are being pushed aside or forgotten - in this case, perhaps, multiculturalism, civil liberties, international cooperation, the humanity of the "enemy". Media analysis can thus be a tool that can help us understand how the culture is responding to a catastrophe as well as a tool that can help us recover important ideas and values that need to be heard as the society deliberates about subsequent actions.

Some kinds of meanings seem to belong to everyone and thus go unquestioned; other kinds are ascribed to particular groups and individuals and weighed against their presumed biases. Yet, surely we need to question what values are ascribed to "everyone" in a society as complex and as diverse as the United States and in a time as complicated and emotionally charged as this one. Consider how our opinions get narrowed in a poll which appeared on the Netscape homepage. Visitors were asked, "How do you feel about Tuesday's terrorist attacks?" and given the choice, "Angry, Sad, or Shocked." Each respondent can choose one and only one of these terms to describe the intense array of feelings they are experiencing and then read how others have responded. As of Sunday afternoon, 53 percent of respondents chose "angry" over "sad" - 21 percent - and "shocked" -26 percent.

One can imagine the process over time of people returning to the site, learning which was the expected response, and narrowing their emotions accordingly. And what of the choices not offered - "afraid", for example, which could refer both to our fear of alien assualt and the fear of immigrant citizens of a backlash. These meanings and emotions are not available as an option in the Netscape survey - and in some cases, not acknowledged in the newscasts either.

To some degree, this is a microcosm of what has happened as we have watched the media this past week - we have been taught which are the right feelings, the right meanings, to ascribe to the event. We may have resisted such narrowing of our emotion, yet it has a real impact on the public response to these events as an agregate. In such a context, one can, of course, choose your own response, one not on the menu, yet it is much harder to sustain that alternative selection when all of the resources are pointing you in other directions and in this case, you literally wouldn't be able to express your point of view. This is the essence of what Fiske argues occurs during a "media event" - meanings get proposed, quickly filtered, and then certain ones emerge as the preferred choices for the society as a whole, where-as other groups struggle to get their meanings heard over the noise.

Henry is the Director of MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies. Shari is a Research Affiliate in the program.

Questions to Consider

• How is that experience of nonstop news different from the experience of watching a summary of news at the end of the day or even having the broadcast dial periodically interrupted?
• How does the need to fill airtime with whatever information is at hand shortcut the process of shifting through, evaluating, editing information before it is brought to the public attention?
• How does such coverage increase the likelihood of misreporting or of the transmission of inaccurate information and ill-considered comments?
• Why do people want to keep watching the news when they know that there is little or no new information to be gleamed?
• What factors shape the range of meanings and emotions represented through television news coverage of this catastrophe?
• What might be done to insure that a broader range of ideas and perspectives get considered?
• What do you see as the long-term and short-term consequences of this narrowing of available options?
• How would it feel to be understanding the events from a fundamentally different perspective and be unable to communicate or share what you are feeling, because everyone around you seems to be agreeing on what the event means and what you are supposed to be feeling?
• As we watch the media coverage of this event unfold, day by day, what do you see as the dominant meanings or emotions for each day and what meanings do you see start to emerge or disappear within the conversation?

Further Reading

• John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
• John Fiske, Power Plays Power Works (London: Verso, 1993.)
• Elaine Scarry, "Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War," Media Spectacles ed. Marjorie Garber, John Matlock, & Rebecca L. Walkowitz, (New York, London: Routledge, 1993).
• Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. Selected articles include: Mary Anne Doane, "Information, Crisis, and Catastrophe." Patricia Melloncamp, "TV Time and Catastrophe or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television." Stephen Heath, "Representing Television."

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